Mark Gresham

@seanapriori @criticalurban Living in high density has a negative impact on humans, psychologically and otherwise, attested by multiple studies. This goes for groups as well as individuals.

@EarRelevant @criticalurban Living at high densities has obvious economic benefits. There is a general rule that people will tend to avoid commuting more than 1 hour to work. Having lots of people agglomerated together in one spot creates thicker, more efficient markets.

This guy is doing free lobbying for developer deregulation. By the way, TOD is an admission that mass transit provides poor mobility, requiring buildings to be moved next to transit, because the transit can't take you beyond its fixed station locations.

@seanonolennon Both power and weakness act as amplifiers or enablers of underlying human flaws, rather than pure creators of evil from nothing. Perhaps moderation is the antidote.

Power corrupts, but so does Weakness.

Maybe it's not fumbling. Maybe it's intentional. Maybe some people with power and influence really don't like the idea of adding the rail to the Beltline? Maybe they are not among those who expect to make a killing off of investment in Beltline-adjacent real estate and development? It is a curious thing to ponder.

Pathetic. We have the money. It is completely fucked we are fumbling again and again on delivering a new transit line despite decades of hard work, countless hours & dollars invested by neighbors, and the easy fucking layup we have in front of ourselves.

@GAFollowers Less traffic at night, but also a lot less heat.

Waking up to this is fucked.

@seanapriori @criticalurban Fair warning, then, not to exceed that density limit; not even to come very close to it.

@criticalurban There is a density limit up to which cars provide better mobility than transit. After that, the externalities of all the cars competing with each other makes perpetual reliance on them untenable. Transportation always has a mobility/capacity tradeoff. This isn't very hard.

The real problem, as experienced on Facebook, is it Universal and one or two other big labels are continuously making false claims about music on videos posted on Facebook. One example is a private Chinese recording of Gustav Mahler's Symphony Number 1 from a live concert. The symphony has long been in the public domain. The audio master is not owned by Universal. But on multiple occasions Universal or its algorithm has tagged this recording as belonging to them, which is a total lie. The owner of the recording or their representative has to notify the contact to argue that it is public domain and the recording is private and their own not commercial, and the music video gets untagged. Then a couple of months later, Universal does it again to the same recording on Facebook. In this particular case, Universal must have made the false claim maybe six times over the course of a year. Copyright enforcement is fine, when it's legitimate. But this is not.

@EarRelevant @Sassafrass_84 @kyeahdidit I asked for alternatives see bellow . x.com/i/grok/share/5…

@Sassafrass_84 Even if it's not Universal Music per se, need to look into this. See who is doing what.

Reading comments: my first reaction is it's the damn lawyers at Universal Music again, just like they were doing on Facebook, making false copyright claims determined by automatic algorithms. I have not tried posting a video with music. But I really do want to know what's going on.

@goranmTO @Sassafrass_84 @kyeahdidit Shit. Universal Music is up for their games again.

Groks words X lacks a built-in feature to add licensed music tracks to videos or photos, unlike TikTok or Instagram Reels, forcing users to embed audio in their own video files before uploading. • Users can still upload videos containing music, but copyrighted tracks often trigger muting, reduced visibility, or takedowns due to standard copyright enforcement, not a new blanket ban. • No recent platform announcement or widespread update on May 22, 2026, confirms a policy change; similar user complaints have appeared earlier in 2026.

@Sassafrass_84 What?

@BillyM2k Oh heck, it's all ready Friday!

goodnight tomorrow is friday gettin’ down on friday

I think one of the things you have to consider is the political left's apparent current war against excellence. In 2019 I was at the national conference of the League of American Orchestras in Nashville. They had one of those large bulletin boards in the lobby with a bunch of push pins and index cards, so that attendees could answer the big question posted on the board, which I will quote only in part: "How much excellence are you willing to give up in order to..." I'll let you fill in what follows the ellipsis in terms of leftist politics. So mediocrity is not merely accepted and not criticized (except for straight white men where it's open season) but it is applauded as a bringer of "equity." After all, if someone brings excellence to the table, that is somehow "unfair" to those who do not. (BTW, excellence and diversity are not mutually exclusive, IMHO, but a lot of people on the left seem to think so, given the amount of mediocrity that's inserted into positions of power.) If the Democratic Party wants to pursue being acolytes of Mediocrates in the name of whatever crazy ass leftist ideology they want to follow down a dark alley, then they are certainly welcome to do so. But don't expect me to vote for it. (Don't worry, the shiny shoe Country Club establishment Republicans generate their own problems with the "it's his turn" college fraternity method of political nominations. Plenty of room for stupid on all sides.)

How about instead we stop mediocre women from running democratic organizations? It’s weird, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard a Democrat accuse a woman or person of color of being “mediocre”

Most of the urbanist Borg cubes being built in suburban cities, as their city leaders will only say in private, have happened in recent years because the federal government comes in and says, "You will do this, or we won't give you money for the things you really need." This is mandate for high density by force of government economic pressure (as well as the fact that developers make more money doing high density), it is not the culture of those areas. But the militant urbanists will not rest until high density is mandated everywhere. Those who don't want it should fight it and take their small cities back.

Most suburb critics are just suggesting those rigidly strict laws be relaxed somewhat, not that we replace mandates to build single-family homes with mandates to build duplexes or tower blocks or anything else. Just let people build what they want without a veto from local laws.

The urban core generates almost all of a typical U.S. city's tax revenue but most of it goes to fund roads, sewer lines, power lines et al in suburbs. If suburbs paid for themselves, rather than leaching off the city, I think a lot more people would be live and let live on this.

Contrary example: City of Atlanta (Georgia) is mostly within Fulton County. For decades, just within my lifetime, Fulton County collected taxes from upper middle income residents who lived in the unincorporated north side of the county but spent it in downtown Atlanta. The practice of the state legislature during those years prevented any portion of that unincorporated area from incorporating into a municipality, at the behest of the legislators representing Atlanta -- the political agreement between them and the rural legislators not in the metro area being "You don't screw with us, we won't screw with you." So an Atlanta education part of the more suburban/exurban north Fulton tried unsuccessfully incorporate the city of Sandy Springs which would have allowed the new city to keep a generous proportion of taxes that it could spend on its own incorporated area, instead of it being spent by Fulton County in downtown Atlanta. But with a big political change in 2002 in the state legislature, Sandy Springs eventually became incorporated. Once that happened, the rest of unincorporated Fulton County began incorporating into several different new cities (the cities of Alpharetta and Roswell had already existed) and the corrupt siphoning of their taxes to Downtown Atlanta to be spent got mostly turned off. The unincorporated areas of the south side of Fulton County likewise mostly did the same. It's funny because Fulton County leaders would always tell the people in South Fulton "either we have to increase your taxes, or we'll have to cut back on services" to which the South Fulton residents would reply, "What services?" The more sparsely populated yeah the unincorporated South Fulton likewise had their taxes spent downtown. But they too were allowed by the legislature finally to address the issue through a spade of incorporation. So you believe it's the city that supports the suburbs? Bullshit! That money is spent downtown, not in the suburbs. But now at least in the last two decades the suburbs in Fulton County, on either side of the city of Atlanta, have been able to keep a more reasonable portion of the taxes they pay invested in their own local areas. And yeah, you should already know of the corruption Fulton County from repeated news about election controversies. It's just that it's not only elections where the county has a history of corruption and other misbehavior. The 1940s concept of a "downtown focused" large city and metropolitan area is now obsolete. Time for the octopus to die

@GrizzledTexan @creation247 This wasn't amusing? 😎

@EarRelevant @creation247 I've never seen any group of people spend so much time arguing the non existence of a thing than atheists. I don't believe the earth is flat, but other than a few times for amusement, I don't go around arguing with them.

This post has over 1000 comments and not one atheist can explain why…

@GrizzledTexan @creation247 In short: You don't have to believe in the actual existence of something (even if only as a concept) to greatly dislike and criticize it.

@EarRelevant @creation247 So they don't like what God is like even though they don't believe in God? How does that make sense?

True. But that also ignores the militant urbanists' desire to not let you go far from destinations to which they would like to limit you. Hence, density is the ideologically wedded partner of public transportation, especially rail. They actually do not want you to use on automobile as a means to get you to the rail station. They want your proximity to the station to be limited. High density is the partner of that arrangement.

@notzeldin @EarRelevant When you drive, you go directly between unique locations. On any mass transit, on both ends, you'll need another means of transportation to get you to and from the unique locations that are your origin and destination, and that takes a lot of time.

All of Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, and part of England across the channel fit into Texas. Jets are about 3 times as fast as high speed trains. There's a reason we primarily rely on air travel in the US.

@barely_th3re You would make Andy Young so sad! 🤣

freeway removal through Atlanta is largely impractical in the short term, but we should remove John Lewis Freedom Parkway and replacing it with a surface boulevard. JLFP is a relic of I-485 and is underutilized. removal would reconnect downtown w/ the old 4th ward

@creation247 @WhiteHouse For me, it never left.

@WhiteHouse Bring Columbus day back!

And in this house, Christopher Columbus is a hero.