D. Malcolm Carson

@ajlamesa Do you not want people to be able to travel?

@dmalcolmcarson Not using it for personal long-term shelter

If we got rid of — or severely disciplined — Airbnb, private equity, and a lot of the non-resident foreign buyers (often investors), our housing prices would be significantly more reasonable. Housing stock must be prioritized for long-term shelter. Yes, build more homes, but also weed out some problematic demand.

Could be. It seems highly likely that desertification of the Sahara resulted in people migrating to the Nile Valley, and the timing seems to more or less line up with the beginnings of Egyptian civilization. But the earliest civilization (Sumer) predated Egypt by ~1000 years and was located in southern Iraq. I think it's more likely that the Garden of Eden was underneath what is now the Persian Gulf. Sea levels rose ~450 feet coming out of the Ice Age and that's a very shallow sea. In Ice Age conditions that would've been a very moist, fertile and temperate river valley, with annual floods and sediment perfect for irrigated agriculture. It's easy to imagine successive floods forcing people further and further upstream on the Tigris-Euphrates, but each time they brought with them accumulated knowledge of agriculture in that area and of the mythology around the Garden and the Flood. Then, 1000+ years later civilization spread west to the Nile Valley and east to the Indus Valley at about the same time (~3000 BC).

I am of the opinion that when the Sahara was green, this could possibly where stories about the garden of Eden came from. And when the Sahara dried humanity took those stories with it in every direction since that was a climate catastrophe of epic proportions.

@SaladBarFan Maybe so, that's for the voters to decide, and over two-thirds have been supportive whenever it's been asked of them. Generally, they seem favorably disposed to supporting public transit, even if most don't use it.

@dmalcolmcarson That’s a terrible ROI per dollar spent in the region

LA county spends lots of money transit, it’s just that nobody rides it because it isn’t useful.

@SaladBarFan LA's % using transit is about average for a U.S. metro area.

@dmalcolmcarson Not as a %

@TheOmniZaddy @SaladBarFan Yes, the marginal impact of those cars would be tremendous.

@SaladBarFan @dmalcolmcarson Congestion scales exponentially with every additional vehicle! That ridership # is definitely not high enough, but also makes way more of a difference than can be extrapolated from a simple %pop analysis.

@SaladBarFan Sure, relative to Tokyo, it's small. Relative to every other city in North America not named New York it's a lot of people.

@dmalcolmcarson In a region the size of LA it practically *is* nobody

@Libyco_ We should terraform this back into existence . . .

North Africans are descendants of an apocalyptic climate transition.

@SaladBarFan It's a lot more than "nobody". Put 500k more cars onto LA freeways, and I'd bet it'll feel like a lot of people!

@dmalcolmcarson That’s not a lot of people

@the_transit_guy Probably Washington, DC. If it were scheduled during the summer when Congress is out of session, there would be a ton of excess hotel capacity. The new stadium could host. Compact walkable core around the hotels. The transit system is already set up to accommodate large events.

What US city would actually be a great host for the summer Olympics?

@el_manels @bogeyfromhell @conor64 cbc.ca/radio/asithapp…

@bogeyfromhell @conor64 Then what did you mean

A question for everyone: survey data suggests that by the end of the Covid-19 emergency trust in public health institutions had decreased significantly. If you are among the people who reacted that way, why specifically? I'm hoping for long, diverse, individualized answers.

1. If you read public health literature prior to 2020, the emphasis in responding to any pandemic was always on reducing collateral damage. You isolate the sick, but try to keep everything else as close to normal as possible. We did the exact opposite. 2. There was good data by mid-March 2020 and all through the pandemic showing practically zero risk of severe disease for otherwise healthy children and young adults and practically zero risk of outdoor transmission for everyone. Yet, we closed schools and parks. 3. From the start, there was plenty of evidence that preexisting preventatives and therapeutics like Vitamins A, C and D, hydroxycloroquine and ivermectin were safe and effective, yet there were either not promoted or actively suppressed. 4. Masks. When the goal was to save them for medical professionals, Fauci called them ineffective. Then, any mask even just a piece of cloth was not only deemed effective, but required in all public settings. Then, we we were told that only N95s were effective. 5. People, including previously respected scientists and medical professionals, getting banned from social media for posting things about COVID that were absolutely, provably true. 6. A thousand public health professionals publicly urging people to protest George Floyd's killing after having been collectively responsible for locking them in their homes and closing their schools and workplaces for several months leading up to that. 7. Requiring proof of vaccination to enter public spaces, which could only be justified if the vaccine prevented transmissions, which it did not, despite a mountain of lies and false advertising to the contrary. 8. This is a little more personal, but the entire approach to COVID ran contrary to my understanding of personal health, which is that you can't avoid pathogens in the environment, they're everywhere. Health is about your resilience to those pathogens. All COVID public health policies harmed rather than helped resiliency.

@dilanesper @ThomasWillett9 The IOC rule doesn't involve "genital inspections", it's a cheek swab or blood test, one time ever. It seems fairly obvious to me that this rule will eventually be adopted across all sports beyond the age of puberty.

@ThomasWillett9 Here's my tip, and it really is sincere. The only part of the sports issue that the trans movement can salvage is with regards to teenagers. There's local control arguments, the competitions aren't that important, teenagers are sympathetic, genital inspections are bad.

this talking point isn't gonna work

@arctotherium42 You're absolutely right this deserves to be thoroughly documented in the most serious way possible.

I regret not being able to do this topic justice; it really needs a proper book/documentary/TV series, with interviews with key participants (eg Vijaya Gadde) and a look through archives of major institutions. Tweet threads and essays are not enough.

Master thread on the 2015-2022 closure of the Internet, the process by which every major Internet platform went from broadly open with a few basic guidelines to strict narrative enforcement, often with the collaboration of govts and outsourcing moderation power to NGOs.

@MelissaCarbal14 They're probably just waiting for someone to hit the ball. If that's you, then yeah, I can see how it could be boring, hits don't actually happen very much. But baseball fans watch every pitch and if you do that, often the lead up to a pitch is very exciting.

I don’t get how people find baseball boring

@EWErickson The problem these kinds of critiques always seem to miss is that the Internet allows for immediate, long-form, fact-checking. There's all the time and digital "bits and bytes" in the world to just examine every possible angle, and that's what these people are doing.

Elon Musk took over Twitter, ridiculously changing its name to the single letter of the alphabet most associated with pornography, adjusted the algorithm away from the Left’s preferences, but then opened the door to AI slop, ever increasing misinformation, and raging antisemitism. On a daily basis, accounts drop AI generated videos seeking to mislead people. Tel Aviv has been leveled by Iran two dozen times in the past four weeks and anything that offends the Left is a genocide. Insanity runs rampant. People who want to be informed are, instead, misled. Twitter has been exploited by monetized accounts seeking profit from outrage and by misinformation campaigns seeking to undermine a war effort against the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism. In a hyper-online age, people have lost the ability to discern what is true. They too often rely on influencers on the internet who often have an incentive to keep people whipped into existential terror and lie. They claim some special gnostic insight that you can only determine by following those people. From QAnon to Charlie Kirk conspiracies, they promise you access to special knowledge. ewerickson.substack.com/p/addled-brains

@feelsdesperate "Third World-ism" implies that people in the Third World hold these positions, and they by and large do not. This ideology 100% comes from the "First World", you can't blame the Third World for it, even if they are the supposed (but not actual) beneficiaries.

It can’t be real ‘third worldism,’ right? Because the liberational movements that spawned that ideology are now 50 to 70 years in the past? People are using third-worldist rhetorical framing more but it doesn’t quite fit. They seem to use it out of convenience - it’s familiar (they’ve studied it) and they need something to placard onto an ideology of resentment, malice, and entitlement that is otherwise too sclerotic and muddled to articulate itself.

@CoreyWriting Those figures are are "by metro", and the metro SF area is not all that much more walkable than metro Miami.

The hype of the sunbelt cities fades away after you live there and realize they actually suck without having to drive everywhere. Car dependent cities are terrible. SF and NYC are awesome because of the walkability.

@Kazanjy It's not welfare, but it is public. Why shouldn't they serve families in the Mission the same as they do families in Palo Alto?

45% of the UC Berkeley applicants from Mission High School, a school with 42% reading proficiency, get admitted because the UC isn't an institute of higher learning any longer, but instead is now another form of welfare.